Team Coaching
Shifting our focus from 1:1 coaching toward 1:Team coaching may begin to increase our ability to improve teamwork across the spectrum of healthcare environments and professions. There is a growing body of Team Coaching literature that indicates this approach may take longer to establish yet improve teamwork across a variety of professions, including healthcare. Leaders in healthcare have been calling for silo-busting, team-building transformations for decades, yet may not realize that may not manifest fully until enough Health Team Coaches are developed in the model of great coaches like Jackson, Popovich and Gladstone.
Yet, even amongst international leaders in Team Coaching, we find we are early in the process of fully understanding the best approaches and competencies required for team-coaching: In an extraordinary Podcast including David Clutterback, Marita Fridjhon, Jennifer Briton, Ruth Wagament, Peter Hawkins and Phil Sandhal—godparents of Team Coaching—we find even our thought leaders feel we are 20-30 years behind our understanding of 1:1 coaching (Clutterback, et al, 2016). A simple search of Google for Team Coaching reveals 9,000 articles, demonstrating an explosion of research indicating our understanding is accelerating and the impact of Team Coaching is likely to be lasting.
In this Team Zone Podcast, Cultterback and his associates also point out the vital importance of Team Coaching leading to Self-Coaching Teams—a concept that aligns well with Complex Adaptive Systems in which Self-Organizing Groups / Teams / Communities are the engine of emergent phenomena and behaviors that push an organization into a future state over time (Fish and Bergquist, 2024b)
Self-coaching teams appear to have 4 key components (Walsh, 2021). Two of these components concern “what a team is doing.” The other two concern “what a team is being”:
2 Things Self-Coaching Teams are doing:
1) Uses communication to deepen relationships and connections
2) Lives in commitment to collective and ongoing learning
2 Things Self-Coaching Teams are being:
1) Creates a space of deep trust and psychological safety
2) Aware of what’s not being expressed in the room and brings it to light.
The challenge is to create the scale and scope of initiatives necessary to spread Team Coaching throughout the complex environment of healthcare. We likely need external coaches to develop internal coaches throughout the healthcare system, including physician leaders. Some in other industries are looking to shift from a “manager” to a “coach” role for middle management to achieve this aspiration for self-coaching teams:
In 2015 one of the top priorities of senior executives in the business community was the transformation of managers into coaches. In this important Harvard Review, author Keith Ferrazzi (2015) describes six (6) ways organizations and leaders can lead this important transformation:
1) Encourage peer-to-peer coaching
2) Create coaching mentorship partnerships
3) Tap into coaching already present in managers
4) Prioritizing learning and daily learning activities
5) Use 1:1 check-ins to support coaching efforts
6) Provide or seek formal coach training for managers
